The Royal Opera House is now recruiting six new apprentices to join in September 2016.

Positions will be available in the Scenic Art, Scenic Carpentry, Costume, Technical Theatre, Lighting and Wigs and Make-up departments.

'Before I started I had the impression that the Royal Opera House was a big corporate workplace, almost like a factory, but I couldn’t have been more wrong', says Technical Theatre apprentice Jack Eaton. 'Yes, it is a big building but it’s also like a family; everyone knows your name, even if you can’t always remember theirs!'

The ROH apprenticeship scheme has been running since 2007 and currently has 17 apprentices employed across 12 different disciplines. Apprenticeships run for two years and are located at the ROH's Covent Garden or Thurrock sites. The Costume department position will be the first apprenticeship to take place in the new Costume Centre at High House Production Park.

'You don't need to know a lot about ballet or opera, you just need to be enthusiastic and ready to learn', says Costume Performance Support and Footwear apprentice Sophie O’Connor. 'I really love being a part of all the different productions, there is a great energy and working here is really enjoyable.'

Perhaps the first thing to strike you when watching Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni, which returns to the Covent Garden stage this summer, is how the physical set is quite literally a blank canvas – the base for another, virtual set that seems to paint itself on in light before your eyes.

The first breaktaking visual effect occurs during the overture, when the names of the women in Giovanni’s notorious catalogue of sexual conquests begin to write themselves on the set, as if scripted by many invisible hands. Finally, Leporello enters, holding a pencil, and scribbles the name of his master’s latest conquest, or victim, depending on your point of view: ‘Anna’.

Giovanni’s catalogue is the starting point for the visual themes of the production. From this, the design team – video designer Luke Halls, set designer Es Devlin and lighting designer Bruno Poet – created this effect. Halls commissioned calligraphers to write out each name in Giovanni’s not-so-little black book, the sum of which is 2,065, if you add up all those detailed by Leporello during his Catalogue Aria. Halls then animated each of these scripts to look as if they are being handwritten in real time.

But how does a video animation find its way on to the set? The secret lies in a piece of specialist equipment, a small black box known simply as a d3, which is a combination of software and hardware. As well as being a programmable ‘brain’ that enables a designer to create virtual three-dimensional simulations from video-based installations, it can also send these images to a projector to play back live on set.

Both programming and then operating the d3 unit during the performance is Gareth Shelton, sound and broadcast deputy manager, who works closely with the design team and the production manager, Will Harding.

So how does the singer playing Leporello know where and when to start writing when he appears on stage? The answer, says Gareth, in this case is not so much technological trickery as plenty of rehearsal time. ‘There are clear musical cues when he should write. In the first production, Alex Esposito practices writing the script over and over again, in the right sequence to the music, until it was perfect. And, although this is invisible to the audience, if you look carefully in the right place, the word ‘Anna’ is penciled on, ever so faintly to act as a guide.’

Having a set that’s entirely painted by light throws up other challenges too – how do you light the singers without washing out the set around them? ‘The set is effectively lit by the video, with some regular lighting enhancement,’ explains Gareth, ‘and then the singers are tracked by several followspots.’ But perhaps the cleverest and most complicated effect goes almost unnoticed by the audience. At several points the set, which is cube-shaped, starts to rotate, and the projections of doors and windows rotate with it, seamlessly obeying the laws of perspective and foreshortening and changing shape. It looks so natural you could overlook it, but it is in fact fiendishly complicated, based on constant feedback between the motor moving the set and the d3 unit, which detects the position of the set and adjusts the image it projects accordingly. ‘If it didn’t work, you would know, but when it does it looks just like a regular painted set that’s rotating, albeit enhanced with some beautiful animations.’

Gareth achieved this by spending several weeks programming the d3 unit with Luke Halls’s video designs, taking into account the size of the set, the angle of rotation and distance of the projector from the set. There was plenty of time spent in music rehearsals too, making sure every musical cue aligned with the visual effects. With such painstaking attention to detail, Gareth admits he has probably memorized every note in the opera.

Gareth’s biggest challenge after the revival of the production however, will come when The Royal Opera takes Don Giovanni on tour to Tokyo and Osaka in September this year. ‘We have very little time to reconfigure the show in Tokyo,’ he says. ‘It is the same set, but bear in mind it’s a different-shaped theatre, with different angles, heights and positions. We then go to Osaka, where we have just one day to get it right.’

Don Giovanni is staged with generous philanthropic support from the Danish Research Foundation and The Royal Opera House Endowment fund. It is a co-production with Houston Grand Opera.

An exhibition showing the making of Don Giovanni is currently on display in the main entrance foyer of the Royal Opera House. The free exhibition melds video, designs and costumes to offer unique insight into the process of staging this production.

This article was originally published in the Royal Opera House Magazine, received quarterly by theFriends of Covent Garden.

On Saturday 23 March, the Royal Opera House will join hundreds of millions in a global 'lights off' to celebrate Earth Hour, the world's largest public action for the environment.

External lights will be switched off between 8.30-9.30pm GMT with an additional 'sweep' of the building to ensure that no internal lights in areas and offices not in use have been switched off. The evening's performance of Tosca will see lights dimmed during the first interval.

Working with environmental non-profit consultancy Julie's Bicycle, the Royal Opera House has an environmental action plan which aims to tackle climate change.

Lighting designer Paule Constable revealed the world of lighting opera and theatre productions as part of an ROH Insights session.

‘If you imagine when you’re first making a show and a director is [working out] how they want to tell a story, they’re obviously going to think very early on about the set and costume designer that they’re going to work with’, Paule said. ‘How that is seen, how it’s perceived, how it’s brought to life is what the lighting designer does.’

On working on this key aspect of production design, Paule said: ‘There are infinite possibilities with light – it’s very far from arbitrary. We consider every decision we make in a huge amount of detail.’

Paule also spoke about how she got into lighting design: ‘I love the technical side of things, which for many [lighting designers] is our way in. I love climbing ladders and changing gels and playing with light but I also found I really loved what you can do with light in a theatre.’

On Saturday 31 March the Royal Opera House will be taking part in Earth Hour and switching off non-essential lights.

We will be joining organisations in London such as the National Theatre, National Gallery and The Globe as well as landmarks such as the Houses of Parliament (including Big Ben), London Eye, and many others worldwide, by turning out signage or non-essential lights for the hour.

All over the world, landmarks, individuals, businesses and venues from London to Sydney, Berlin and Singapore, will be joining in switching off their lights at 8.30pm to show they care about tackling climate change and protecting the natural world.

During the evening's performance of Romeo and Juliet the auditorium lights and other front of house lights, as well as some of those on the exterior of the building, will be dimmed in a gesture of support. All non-essential lights around back of house and office areas will also be switched off.

Further information about the event is available from the World Wildlife Fund's Earth Hour website.